Yes, but 30x a tiny number is still tiny. That isn't a reasonable way to determine "danger", it's a statistical fallacy.
Like, the difference in traffic deaths between the US and UK is 10.6 to 2.9 per capita, which is under 4x. But the actual lethality difference is massive. It pretty much completely swamps the difference in gun murders (I'm treating this as a naive comparison to prove a point, not trying to dig into the particulars of these stats), but I don't here people making sanctimonious posts about an absolute hard-line refusal to moving to the US due exclusively to the dangerous driving culture.
I'm not sure whether this was your point, but USA population is just under 5 times the UK population, but that US road deaths figure is more than 25 times the UK one.
Of course, the nature of UK city centres and geographic size means that there is bound to be more travelling by car in the US in the first place. But at least part of the difference has to be a different emphasis on road safety in the UK compared to the US.
That isn't a particularly useful stat. Americans may just drive a higher percentage of their drives on highways, where one is most likely to kill oneself in a car. And saying something is 'dangerous' doesn't imply that it is 'deadly'. You may be much more likely to be in a small accident on a narrow, back-country English road than in a wide, back-country US road.
I agree. The gun commentary triggered my skepticism, but this is what really pushed me over the edge:
> And US teenagers are twice as likely to die in car accidents than their peers abroad.
As of 2013, the average driver in the UK drove 7,900 miles[1]. The average driver in the US drives 16,550 miles[2].
It should be no surprise that people who drive twice as much die twice as often while driving.
As for guns - I'm interested in figuring out what the actual per capita and absolute numbers are, but don't have time to dig that up at the moment; I know from experience that it's very difficult to find and verify information about "gun deaths" in the US. In the past I've found that anti-gun groups have lumped in people as old as 24 as "children", while pro-gun groups have excluded justifiable homicides including those occurring during law enforcement activities. I may come back to this, if anyone is interested and I have the time.
The relevant statistic is fatalities per billion vehicle-kilometers, which attempts to even out that discrepancy, and leads to the same conclusion. Using this metric, the US still has twice the fatality rate than the UK.
> In the EU it's half that.
I'd like to see a source on that. I think the average American drives about 30% more.
Their metric is "deaths per billion vehicle miles travelled", so yes, I think it's a fair comparison.
It naturally scales up and down to match the amount of driving that happens in different countries.
I'm only deeply familiar with the US and UK, but the contrast there is pretty stark. I routinely see people on their phones or driving drunk in the US. Those do happen in the UK but they're a lot rarer.
The key figure, I think, is number of fatalities per billion vehicle Kilometers. For the USA that is 7.1. Unfortunately, Americans drive A LOT MORE than most other countries, so raw annual fatality count is very high (~34K). By comparison UK has 3.6 fatalities/billion KM and fatality count of 1.8K. Population ratio is ~6:1 US:UK. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...)
There are other countries where fatalities are much higher.
This is probably the best we can reasonably do but even this doesn't show the whole picture. I think it makes it look like most (but not all) of the safety difference is due to much less distance driven in the UK. But, given identical attitudes and driving style, I would expect accidents per km to be much higher in the UK because more time is spent on much slower urban roads in town centres (perhaps not big city centres so much) and UK suburban (which is much higher density => smaller distance than US suburban). So the spatial density of opportunity for vehicle/pedrestrian collision is much greater.
Perhaps per unit time spent driving would be closer, but still not there.
But that's all to say, I think the UK numbers are better than the USA ones by an even larger factor than they appear.
Deaths by billion vehicle miles in UK - 5.2. In US - 12.5. (both have tens of thousands of KSI, but the US has over twice as many per cap. In fact, way, more KSI from car accidents than even gun related homicide in the US. I hadn't realized that!)
Deaths by gun related homicide in UK - 200. In US - 20000. (Both numbers pale in comparison to motor vehicle deaths, but there are a lot more in the US. Probably to be expected as there is stringent firearm control in the UK.)
Deaths by drug overdose and poisoning in UK - ~5000. In US - um, yeah, well over 120000 if you count the poisonings too as the UK does. (I'll just say, I think we found one of our major culprits in this one.)
I'm thinking overdoses is a major contributor. It's the only way to get to millions in less than 10 years. Car accidents, maybe, but honestly it's not that much compared to the number of young people who die every year. Ditto, with gun related homicide, which is even less than car accidents.
I know we may not want to talk about it, but I also noticed major numbers in suicides among young people. (More than vehicle accidents and gun related homicides combined in 2021.) Not sure if that's where the parent comment was going though? So I left that out. It could be a contributor though? The numbers are there, which is what you need to impact averages.
My takeaway? Suicides and drug overdoses. Not to be taken lightly.
> Most people use traffic deaths per 100k inhabitants when comparing, but that exaggerates the risks of US traffic because people in the US drive more.
They drive because they have to, not because they want to, so it's a sensible comparison.
The article shows a deaths-per-mile driven figure rather early in the article: "For every billion miles Americans drive, roughly 11 people are killed. If American roads were as safe per-mile-driven as Ireland’s, the number of lives saved each year would be equivalent to preventing all the murders in the country." The article looks at a variety of statistics for examining international comparisons of road safety: "And in some ways things have been getting worse. For example, between 2009 and 2013 pedestrian deaths jumped by 15% as the economy recovered. In Britain, over the same period, the number fell by a fifth."
On my part, I would much rather drive in the United States (as I have to, in a culture so bound to the automobile) than in Taiwan, the only other country I've lived in for a long time. I had a driver license the first time I lived in Taiwan (1982 through 1985), but I never drove there. The second time I lived there (1998 through 2001), I didn't even bother getting a driver license. It was a luxury when the Taipei Mass Rapid Transit system extended a subway line out to where I lived in the suburban city of Panchiao during my last year there. I much prefer public transportation commutes to driving commutes when I can get them. (Where I live here in the United States I necessarily have to commute by car to work, even though we chose our neighborhood for its convenient one-mile walking distance from much of our shopping and our visits to the county library branch.) My oldest son was acculturated to public transportation while we were living in Taiwan the second time and now happily lives in New York City without a driver license.
I googled this quickly, and I'm seeing the UK has 36 deaths per billion miles driven [1] and USA is 1.7 [2]. Can you cite your sources that the UK isn't disproportionately high? I could be reading the numbers wrong.
Most people use traffic deaths per 100k inhabitants when comparing, but that exaggerates the risks of US traffic because people in the US drive more.
For example the US has around 12.9 traffic related deaths per year per 100k inhabitants, and France has around 5. That's a ratio of 2.58:1.
But people in the US drive an average of around 23000 km/year. French people average around 13000 km/year. That's a ratio of 1.77:1.
That means that per kilometer driving in the US has about 1.46x the chance of resulting in a traffic related death as driving in France, which is much lower than the 2.58x that most people here would use when comparing.
In terms of absolute risk, which is probably what most people consider when deciding if their car is safe enough, the US has around 1 car related fatality per 130 million vehicle kilometers. For France it is around 1 car related fatality per 190 million vehicle kilometers.
Both of those are low enough that most people probably consider them negligible.
That figure isn't particularly illustrative either, conisdering that, in much of the US, living a normal life requires driving significant distances on a daily basis. In most other countries, driving is an optional convenience.
The deaths per vehicle-kilometer figure doesn't illustrate that it's very difficult to opt out of the automotive dangers in the US. And thus we also have a hard time forcing dangerous drivers to stop driving, in order to keep the rest of us safe from them.
Like, the difference in traffic deaths between the US and UK is 10.6 to 2.9 per capita, which is under 4x. But the actual lethality difference is massive. It pretty much completely swamps the difference in gun murders (I'm treating this as a naive comparison to prove a point, not trying to dig into the particulars of these stats), but I don't here people making sanctimonious posts about an absolute hard-line refusal to moving to the US due exclusively to the dangerous driving culture.
It's just psychological biases at play.
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